I'm reminded why conservatives had to build their own media outlets. It's sort of like Jews and country clubs. Jews built their own, not because they wanted to, necessarily, but because the other clubs wouldn't let them in. They weren't being "clannish." They wanted to play golf, on first-class courses....

Well, we conservatives built our own media outlets--because the other clubs wouldn't let us in. I guess it's working out OK.

Blogger Ryan McNeely (Yglesias, 3/24/10) takes issue with the comparison of put-upon conservative pundits with ethnic discrimination. But the idea that conservatives were ever excluded from corporate media in the first place is nothing but a delusion.

Presumably one of the outlets conservatives built that Nordlinger has in mind was his own National Review.  One of the writers founding editor William F. Buckley first recruited for his staff was Whittaker Chambers, the famous former Communist turned arch-conservative. Chambers' previous perch was at Time magazine,  where he was considered the magazine's most important writer. He had already made his conversion to the right when he went to Time ("Pinkos who did not bat an eye when the Soviet government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants by famine will go for a good cry over the hardships of the Okies," he wrote in a movie review of The Grapes of Wrath--2/12/40), but Henry Luce had no problem taking him on board. (Buckley himself, of course, had a prominent 33-year-career on that notorious suppressor of conservatives, PBS.)

In the bad old days, when no one would let conservatives work in the media, who was the country's most prominent columnist? Walter Winchell, defender of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. Similar politics didn't stop Paul Harvey from getting a daily slot for commentary on the ABC Radio Network.

The fact is that many of the people who owned newspapers, magazines and radio stations--as you might expect of millionaire businessmen--were quite conservative: people like Robert McCormick, Harry Chandler and Frank Gannett. These are the bosses who would have been barring conservatives from working in the media industry.  Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?

Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England "a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs." Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.

--Rich Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru (National Review Online, 3/8/10, via Crooked Timber, 3/9/10)

So, David Paterson will become the massa who gets to appoint whoever gets to take [Rep. Eric] Massa's place. So, for the first time in his life, Paterson's gonna be a massa. Interesting, interesting.

--Rush Limbaugh (Rush Limbaugh Show, 3/9/10, via Media Matters, 3/9/10)

Frothing over the recent Somali pirate caper involving a U.S. flagged merchant ship, Davis insists that, "To end Somali piracy, disproportionate measures against the shore should be taken--for every one pirate assault, a lethal air assault should immediately follow." It's perhaps understandable that Hanson doesn’t mention what Somalia offers in the way of suitable air strike targets; underdeveloped nations like Somalia don't have any. Hanson probably doesn't understand that, because like so many hawkish military historians, he doesn't understand anything about the military. He doesn't know much about warfare theory, either. He calls for extreme (though ineffectual) military measures in response to something he admits "may not be a matter of American national security" committed not by a peer competitor or a group of global extremists but by "two-bit pirates." When a giant purposely crushes an anthill, he's not pursuing a political objective; he's feeding his perversions. That, like waterboarding someone 183 times, is not the sort of thing a global hegemon needs to be doing, Victor.

Calling things "even wackier at the other end of the nut farm," Huber further points to one issue of the Weekly Standard in which both "Barnacle Bill Kristol" and Seth Cropsey call for U.S. troops "going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates' safe havens"--a bellicose position lamentably popular across many right-wing media.